Allows Direct Interaction Example

A Demo for Flutter Issue 76149

Motivation

Music applications have visual parts that need to react without delay. For example, a drum pad on the screen should directly play a sound when tapped. When VoiceOver or TalkBack is enabled, user interactions on visual elements are strongly delayed making music applications impossible to be used by blind people. This code demonstrates the issue and proposes how to solve the problem.

Description of the Demo

The Demo shows a "Drum Pad". When tapped, the pad changes its color from red to white without any perceived delay.

If "Voice Over" is enabled on iOS, the drum pad is not usable anymore.

We need a flag that tells flutter to exclude the drum pad from being treated by accessibility/screen readers.

In a native iOS App I used the following property of an UIView to allow direct and undelayed interaction with a UIView:

self.accessibilityElementsHidden = NO;
self.accessibilityViewIsModal = NO;
self.isAccessibilityElement = YES;
self.accessibilityTraits = UIAccessibilityTraitAllowsDirectInteraction;

While experimenting with the properties of a Semantics widget, I did not find any way to achieve the desired result.

What we need

a) If not existing, something like an allowsDirectInteraction property on Semantics widget is needed to tell the system to let widgets react to user input the same way, no matter if Voice Over/TalkBack is enabled or not.

b) If existing, the Flutter documentation needs to be updated to show how a Semantics Widget can be configured to allow direct interaction.